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Showing posts from December, 2009

Social Networking and Brand Management

People who have known me for some time in real life or on the Internet know that I'm resistant to hop on the bandwagon whenever a new social networking fad hits. In fact, my wife has consistently harassed me by saying that I'll be the last human being to join Facebook . She and everyone else does not understand that I already spend far too much time reading the news (and the local newspapers hate me for it); posting on my favorite gaming website ( www.teamwarfare.com ); playing games; recording music; etc. I have no more free time in that I don't know what to do with myself, so anything new has to be added to the waiting list, prioritized, etc. Facebook would simply suck away so much time that all of the things I want to do now would suffer as a result. So when I joined Twitter last week, it was equivalent to the Second Coming of Christ (my apologies if people consider that heresy) in terms of the surprise that people had when they saw me tweeting of all people. After

P-cubed

This week's exciting news is that - ta-da! - I have received and accepted an offer at a Fortune 1000 software company selling IT Security solutions. After I received the formal offer, I was reminiscing on the journey to get to this point and decided to share some of these thoughts. In any business endeavor, whether short- or long-term, it is foolhardy to "just do it" without any forethought regarding the consequences. From personal experience, I have had a few times in my life where I've said or done things and then (sometimes immediately) wished that life had a Backspace key or that I could somehow press Control-Z (Command-Z for you Macheads) to undo what just occurred. Therefore, if you are going to set your mind to accomplishing a particular goal, you should keep the following three things foremost in your thoughts: Planning. Planning is a necessity regardless of the importance of the task, and I wrote about this in Be Your Own CEO of the Decade (November 23,

Peace and Goodwill

This is the wonderful time of the year when you get your Year in Review edition of Time in the mail and read similar nostalgic pieces around the web. Personally, I think it's a cop-out on the parts of editors and authors because this seems to be a "softball" that the calendar gives them. However, it's not politically correct to have a Scrooge-ish attitude, so in the spirit of the holiday season I bring you this week's blog entry. When I was a lad, my parents had on their bookshelf a book entitled How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. The cover looked boring, and I was only 9 so the outdoors were calling a lot more than reading some unknown book with a stodgy cover. Over the years, I heard now and again how this book was the definitive source on the topic and even recently learned that many considered it a "must read" for salespeople. So while I was in Manhattan last week, I stopped by a Barnes and Noble. I was intending on buyi

Management 101

William Hammer , who is a good friend of mine as well as the founder of Vanderbilt Securities , once told me (paraphrased): "it's a Management 101 concept to stipulate a 'due date' whenever you need something to be done. Otherwise, there will be a lot of hemming and hawing, and you'll never get the information you need." I couldn't agree with him more, but since he said this to me about 10 years ago I'll take it a step further: with the sheer number of hawkers vying for one's attention it's tough to stay focused. In fact, it's so tough that you cannot rely on someone to remember something they promised much less deliver it when you need it. When I was a senior at Clemson University, I had already spent two, seven-month periods working as an intern at IBM's Application Systems Design Lab in Cary, NC. But I had set my sights on their T. J. Watson Research Center for my last seven-month stint before my graduation. My soon-to-be manag